ENABLINGBUSINESSOUTCOMES FASTERTHANEVER
A Leading insurance underwriting comapany serve as third-party managing agents at Lloyd’s. They offer a comprehensive suite of services to both emerging insurance ventures and wellestablished entities. These services include long-term service contracts and IT hosting for multiple clients, in addition to managing their own infrastructure.
Their Head of IT & Infrastructure is responsible for ensuring the continuous evolution of their IT services while maintaining strict adherence to insurance and cybersecurity regulations.
CHALLENGES
The Company's datacentre hosting provider served notice that they would be leaving the current datacentre which gave them no option but to move providers.
Part of the challenge in moving datacentre providers was to ensure:
1 ) Downtime was minimalised
2) No impact on business activities
3) A controlled migration was followed rather than a rushed big bang approach.
SOLUTIONS
Storm worked with the HPE Greenlake team to scope and then deliver the Server & Storage requirements for the new datacentre on a simple consumption-based model with a faster lead time vs traditional procurement. This flexibility allowed the company to increase or decrease its consumption and be billed accordingly rather than upfront.
Storm provided technical project input and oversight of the networking elements through its team of Senior IT Consultants. Storm then led the project planning, procurement, testing, documentation and implementation.
Storm further aided by cleaning up their technology stack and networking configuration post project completion as well as adding resilience to their WAN traffic routing as HA internet switches were added.
The project did encounter issues along the way but Storms technical team followed a structured and logical approach with their best interests in mind. The flexibility to deliver the testing and implementation out of hours, over multiple weekends was critical to the success. The bespoke nature of Storms service is that it echo’s the company values. The majority of problems are not straight forward and in a modern business it is not a case of one answer fits all. Storm took time to understand its client’s needs, which is crucial.
Results
The client has a very strong relationship with all key partners within Storm, which is fundamental in their belief that Storm could assist in the delivery of a project of this size. The most important part of moving to HPE Greenlake is that their clients, were not aware that the primary datacentre was migrated due to the smooth transition led by the Storm team.
thecompanyhavealong-standingrelationshipwithStorm.Inthe past5yearsthisrelationshiphasgrownintoStormbecominga trustedtechnical3rdpartythathaveassistedthemwithmultiple ITprojectsincludingFirewallsandnetworkingimplementations.
-CompanyHeadofIT&Infrastructure
The company has now moved to HPE Green lake which provides:
• Flexible monthly consumption model which can be flexed up or down depending on Asta’s consumption requirements.
• HPE relocation services, provided them with the confidence to do a local migration onsite and allow HPE to manage the physical relocation to new DC.
• Their migration could be rehearsed and completed seamlessly by using Zerto migration licenses.
• HPE Greenlake dHCI (disaggregated Hyper-converged infrastructure) allows Asta to scale compute and storage independently, whilst only paying for what they use leading removing the cost associated to overprovisioning.
HPE Greenlake empowers customers by delivering a seamless cloud experience for their applications and data, regardless of whether they are on-premises or off-premises. The focus is on agility, efficiency, and driving business success.
- James Brooks, Greenlake Business Manager